


our lovelines grew hopelessly tangled

by ennaih (aquandrian)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hate Sex, Jynnic Week, Outdoor Sex, Prompt Fill, Restraints, Sharing a Bed, Smut, Stranded Together, and changing the end of the film, at least these three do, because i couldn't shake this particular idea of a soulmark, cos i love the tropes, rapturous romanticism, so they survive, that ends up in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-01-31
Packaged: 2018-09-20 01:27:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9469373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquandrian/pseuds/ennaih
Summary: In the escape from Scarif, Jyn Erso discovers her soulmate. It is not good.Written for the Alternate Universe themed day of Jynnic Week.





	

**Author's Note:**

> To quote astolat of SPN fandom: Because if a trope is worth doing once, it's worth doing twice.
> 
> Title from _Do You Love Me_ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

The soulmark is a tiny green sprig on the inside of her left wrist when she’s young. For years, it stays like that. She doesn’t think about it, just one more feature of her body, like her annoyingly large front teeth or the bumpy vein on the back of her hand. It’s Chirrut who tells her what it means. And for a while she wonders whether Cassian has a matching green mark somewhere on his skin. When she’s struggling with the stupid satellite dish out in the buffeting winds, she notices in the tumult that it’s grown, extending a little further beyond the cuff of her fingerless gloves. But then the man in white appears like a nightmare and she forgets everything but the hatred burning through her.

“Jyn, no!” Cassian tries to stop her but she lunges out of his hold, lunges for the man fallen under the white cape. He doesn’t get to die so easily, to escape her vengeance.

“Help me,” she screams at Cassian whose face spasms with worry and distaste. Together, they drag the heavy body into the lift. They’re not gentle, she doesn’t care about that. As the green ray appears in the sky and blasts the top of the Citadel Tower on its way to the horizon, they’re pulling that weight between them over the sand.

“We should leave him,” Cassian yells. “We have to save ourselves!”

“No,” she bellows. “You go if you want to, I’m not -- he doesn’t get to escape --”

“No one’s escaping if we don’t --” But then Cassian sees the supply freighter, and she feels the same burst of strength that drives him, that drives them both towards it. The beaches are exploding in the bodies of troopers and soldiers. She knows, sick in her stomach, that their friends are dead or will die soon. It doesn’t stop her scanning the chaos of upblown sand and smoke for familiar shapes in the run to the ship, hoping against hope that they’ll appear to help and be saved in turn.

The tower blows apart, a light gathers painful bright on the horizon. “Go, go, go,” Jyn screams, her blood like thunder in her ears. And then they’re clearing the atmosphere, through the glitter of the dissolving shield, free of the deadly light that incinerates the beach below. Jyn braces her hand against the console, half scanning the instruments to make sure they’re ready to make the jump to hyperspace, and half sick with grief for their friends who never made it after all. In the cargo hold lies the body covered with the white cape. On her hip is the custom blaster that was at one point levelled at her.

“No, fuck,” Cassian exclaims as they come out of the jump too fast. The instruments go haywire. One, two engines blow, sending the ship plunging through the atmosphere, through the clouds. “Hold on,” Cassian yells. 

“We need to eject!” They can’t escape to die now.

“Too late! Brace --”

The freighter hits the ground so hard Jyn snaps back and then forward against the straps of the engineer’s seat. The ship skids through billows of sand, tearing through trees, sparks erupting from the panels and circuitry above their heads. Cassian hauls back on the controls and Jyn smothers the tiny fires she can reach with her sleeves and ragged gloves. The ship lurches up into the air for one sickening moment, slams back down, green branches slapping against the front viewport, and comes juddering to a stop.

For several breathless minutes, Jyn stays frozen in her seat, unable to believe that she has survived. Then a shower of sparks erupts above her head and she’s struggling out of her seat. Cassian gets to an extinguisher before she does, tosses her another. Together, they go through the stolen freighter, dousing the minor fires and assessing the damage. 

“Wait,” she says as Cassian moves toward the hatch going down to the cargo hold. “Let me.” 

He watches her unholster and examine the blaster. “Are you sure?”

“Yep.” She clambers down before him. 

The length of pipe swung at her head clangs off the steel wall. Cassian’s swearing but she’s already taken the man in white down, wanting to pummel his face to a pulp. The pipe clatters to the floor somewhere, they’re rolling in a mess of rage and fabric. She gets in a few savage punches, blood dripping onto her face from somewhere. When she lunges upright, he kicks at her ankle and she lands badly. His hands snap around her throat, fierce blue eyes and hot breath, red blooming on the white of his shoulder. And she gets the muzzle of his own blaster right in his face. 

“Try me.”

He goes still, the rage banked behind wariness.

“Fucking try me, old man.”

He sneers at her even as Cassian binds his wrists behind his back, the cape crushed and wilting. Cassian pushes him back down, the magnetised binders snapping immediately to the wall of the cargo hold. 

“What are we going to do with him?”

Jyn wipes the blood off her face as she gets to her feet with some difficulty, trying to hide the twinge in her ankle. “Later. He can wait. We’ve got more important things to think about.”

The man’s mouth curls with some sort irony. She doesn’t care, defiant enough herself to turn her back on him as she checks the rest of the hold for damage. Her ankle throbs something fierce. Cassian stumbles then, catching himself against the wall. Alarmed, Jyn reaches to help him, aware that they’ve shown weakness to the enemy.

“Come on.” She helps him up to the crew lounge where they discover the blaster wound is bad enough to need more aid than the medkit can offer.

“It’s all right,” Cassian mutters. “Just use the bacta patches. We’ll find something, somewhere.”

“Where even are we?” She glances towards the cockpit, remembering the instruments going nuts.

“I have no idea. The nav system’s shot. We’ll just have to get out and look around.”

__________

 

The planet is enough like Scarif to amuse Jyn in a very horrible way. Sand underfoot, palm trees and lush jungle canopy, blue skies and humid breezes. They walk back as far along the path of destruction the ship had wrought, back to the curve of white gold beach and sparkling blue waters. She stands beside Cassian, silent at the tropical gorgeousness around them, knowing the same thought is in his head, the same heavy grief weighing him down.

They turn away. “We better get some sort of shelter up,” she says. “The ship’s too damaged, we could be poisoned in our sleep.”

Cassian agrees. They hobble back to the freighter, his face drawn with pain. It takes them far too long to carry the orange tarp and poles out, to rig up a sort of tent far enough from the ship to be safe from any explosion but still sheltered by the trees and not out on the vulnerable beach. Her ankle swells fast, she has to grit her teeth and keep on through the pain, tell herself she’ll deal with it later. There could be snakes in the undergrowth, other venomous creatures she hasn’t encountered before. It’s going to take a very long time before she can relax from this state of hyper-vigilance, and the threat in the cargo hold is one more thing to remember.

“I’m going up into the hills,” Cassian says once they’ve carried the medkit and food supplies out to the tent. “If I can get up high enough, maybe I can see some settlement, find some sign of help.” 

Jyn starts to protest, that his wound is too deep and too fresh to risk more exertion. But his face is set. He’s not going to listen to her. “All right. You’ll be careful.”

He stares at her, troubled. “I don’t like to leave you alone with --”

“No worries,” she interrupts cheerfully. “If he tries anything, I’ll just kill him.”

She’s not joking but Cassian grins anyway and sets off, armed and with enough water and a few supplies. He promises to return before nightfall as if they know how long the day is on this planet. 

Jyn struggles to her feet, furious at her pain. As she makes her way between the trees back to the ship, she notices the soulmark again. It’s no longer a sprig, it’s a long tendril of green curling out from under her glove. She thinks of Cassian tramping into the hills and wonders again, half shamed at her own prurient thoughts. All she’s seen of his body is his shoulder when they tended to his wound, and there were no such marks. Has he noticed hers? He wasn’t there when Chirrut had told her, when she had listened and laughed it off.

Romantic nonsense, anyway. Who has time for such silliness when the damned galaxy is tearing itself apart? When that man in the hold is wreaking such havoc across families and planet systems?

The man has fainted. She stares at him from a careful distance with some misgiving. The left half of his white jacket is soaked with blood, ruined. Blaster at the ready, she approaches cautiously. He really is out cold. That’s probably a good thing even if he is stupidly heavy as she drags him out of the hold and down the ramp towards the orange tent, her ankle making every step agony. If he gains a few more bruises and bumps on the way, that’s not her fault. She wrestles him into the shelter, his stupid white cape all sandy now, and stops to get her breath back. Her ankle really needs to be seen to if she’s to be of use to anyone.

Once it’s strapped and she feels more solid on her feet, Jyn takes the knife to the white jacket. She doesn’t stop to think too much about why she’s helping this man. It’s enough that she doesn’t want him to die yet. Maybe the Rebel Alliance will make use of him, maybe she’ll kill him later when she has time enough. Right now, she bares the bloodied wound just under his shoulder and sets about cleaning it up. Her knives are within reach, close enough that she can have one at his throat when he regains consciousness.

She doesn’t see it until all the blood and filth is scrubbed off and the wound is a ragged gash in reddened skin, half opening an old scar that she realises she knows. She was there when her mother shot him. Now she goes to put the first of the bacta patches on and sees it, horror going cold through her. A green tendril from the hard curve of his shoulder. A single vine like hers. And as she fixes the patch, her fingertips scraping his skin, she watches it grow a little, not towards the wound but down the subtle curve of his bicep. 

It’s nonsense. Complete and utter nonsense. Maybe a thousand people have the same marks, it doesn’t mean anything.

But when she glances down at her own wrist, the vine there has curled a little further on. She pushes Chirrut’s voice out of her head and focuses on taping the wound up.  
___________

 

Cassian returns just after sunset, as the temperature drops and Jyn sits outside the tent, hand on the blaster. He’s exhausted, gratefully accepting the water flask she holds out to him.

“There’s almost nothing,” he says as she checks the dressing on his wound.

“Almost?” It’s seeping a bit but the flesh around looks all right, not infected. As she swabs the fluid away, her gaze flicks to the man partly visible in the shadowed tent.

“I saw smoke rising. Got up a hill as far as I could get and -- maybe it’s a settlement. I think I should check it out.”

Jyn draws back. “How far away?”

He grimaces, twisting his neck to look at his shoulder. “Pretty far off, like a few days hike. I --”

“You’re not going.” She sits back, ready to argue this out. “Or at least you can’t go alone. I’ll --”

Cassian looks very pointedly at her strapped ankle. Exasperated, she retorts, “Well, you can’t go on your own!”

“We have no choice. The ship is too damaged to fly and we have to get back to base. Eventually we’re going to run out of food --”

“We’ll find food.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Cassian replies, “I don’t want to risk poisoning myself on some strange planet I don’t know. I’ll go, it’ll be fine. I’ll find help and come back, hopefully with some sort of transport. It might take me a while --”

“You could die out there. On your own, with that wound, with no one to help you.”

His eyes are very hard. “I’ll be fine. I’ve survived worse. Hopefully I’ll find someone who can get us back home.”

Home. She lets the word sink into her, the memory of that green planet and all its people. 

“Fine.” Jyn shifts her legs, testing her sore ankle, and calls out, “What do you think, Krennic?”

“It’s okay,” she assures Cassian who has his blaster up and aimed at the flap of the tent. It’s too warm to need a fire and the sky is still reflecting so much diffused sunshine on everything, turning all the colours deeper. In these vivid shades, the Director of the Imperial Army sits up carefully within the tent and reaches forward to push the flap aside.

“He’s right. The best chance is to go out and find help. But what do you care about my opinion?”

“I don’t care,” she admits happily, looking at Cassian instead of him. “I just thought you’d pretended to be out of it long enough.”

“Jyn,” warns Cassian, the blaster unwavering.

“It’s fine. He has no weapons and you wounded him pretty well. In fact,” she says with relish, “you opened up a wound my mother gave him. Isn’t that right, Krennic?”

There’s no reply and when she glances over, he gives her a very cold look before he lies back down, his face pale in the gloom.

____________

 

Cassian leaves the next morning just as the sky is changing colour over the trees. Jyn makes him take a good amount of food rations and medical supplies since they have absolutely no working communication equipment. When he disappears into the jungle, she turns back to the campsite, hand on the holstered blaster. 

Orson Krennic, the scourge of her family, sits outside the small orange tent, his hands hanging loose between his knees as he shifts his gaze from the sky down to her. His hair isn’t neatly coiffed anymore, it ruffles across his forehead and sticks up at the back. The white jacket is in shreds somewhere, so is the black tank he wore underneath, the cape discarded inside the tent. He’s barechested save for the white bandage at his shoulder, clad in the boots and black breeches, and very wary as they stare at each other.

They haven’t spoken since last night’s exchange, food handed over in silence. She’d replaced the binders after she’d dressed his wound, and those are still in place, unmagnetised but restrictive. Reminding them both what he is.

Now she decides she has absolutely nothing to say to him, so she makes her way to the ship to have another look at the extensive damages and work out what she can fix, if anything. Start small, do what she can, if only to keep busy. 

About halfway through the day, she puts the welding torch down and flips the mask up, grinning at the panel she’s just repaired.

“How many engines are out?”

She takes a deep breath in and says without looking around, “You’re very lucky I didn’t just burn your face off. Two. Why?”

When she does turn around, he’s got one shoulder braced against the steel jamb of the cockpit, hands still bound before him. He’s much taller than she realised, his shoulders broad and freckled. He has absurdly pink nipples and suddenly she wants very much that he find some clothes.

Now he raises his brows at her, still arrogant. “Maybe I can help.”

She scoffs. “And would you trust you?”

As she gets to her feet, trying not to wince, something his cold eyes catch, he replies, “No, of course not. But I have as much to gain from getting us off this planet as you do.”

Jyn hefts the welding torch as she heads towards him. “And repairing engines on a supply freighter is something you can do, is it? Why don’t I believe you?”

He doesn’t budge, instead tilts his head as he looks down at her. “Clearly as idiotic as your parents, aren’t you?”

“Shut the fuck up about my parents,” she hisses, suddenly livid.

“Why?” He grins, malevolent. “You were the one who brought them up. You were the one who was so keen to remind me whose daughter you are. Aren’t we going to reminisce now?”

Jyn digs her fingers right into the bandage, collapsing the Director of the Imperial Army in a snarl of outraged pain. She grabs his chin as he falls, jabbing the handle of the torch into the centre of his bare chest. “You don’t get to talk about my parents. You don’t speak their names, you don’t mention them to me. You do not deserve that. Do you understand?”

His eyes seethe fury at her, very blue grey. “Yes.”

And she sees the vine grow a little further down his bicep. Disquieted, she pulls back, reminded that there are clothes in the ship’s lockers somewhere. As he straightens up, red spreads across the bandage.

“May I ask something?”

“What?” She tilts her chin up at him. 

For one horrific moment, his eyes drop to her mouth. And then he says, “Could the binders come off please? I realise this might be asking too much but the way I see it, the only other option is you help me with activities probably too intimate and distasteful for you.”

Jyn stares, not understanding. He waits a moment, then his face spasms with exasperation. “Clearly I’m being too subtle. I need to piss,” he says loudly.

“Oh god!”

She stands with her back to him as he pees in the green shadows between the trees, her mortification receding. The binders are going to have to stay off, obviously. When he returns, his silver hair glinting in the sunlight as he ducks his head, she says, “All right. So you think you can do something with the engines?”

His mouth curls, something feline about the curve of his eyes in the sunlight. “I designed a battle station. What do you think?”

Condescending asshole. “Fine. But you realise if you try anything --”

“Yes, you’ll kill me,” he drawls with magnificent boredom and heads back to the ship. She resists the urge to yell something about clothes after him, instead hobbling furiously toward the campsite. She should probably be keeping an eye on him but she can’t bear the idea of spending any more time in his vicinity. So she goes through the medical supplies and the ammunition, cleans her weapons, and rearranges the bedding within the tent, grateful that the weather is good enough that she can sleep on the ground outside like the night before. The cape is folded neatly beside the sleeping bag. She doesn’t touch that.

There are plenty of food rations aboard the ship to last them for months but she stands and stares at the perfect blue ocean, wondering whether she can teach herself to fish, whether it will come to that. She thinks about it as she gathers twigs and driftwood for a fire they may or may not need. Explores the jungle around their tent some more, warily poking at the undergrowth with that same length of pipe. A little way beyond the trees is a clear natural pool, bound by green shrubs, complete with a trickling waterfall over craggy green rocks down the side of the hill. She tries not to think about Cassian out there in the jungle beyond the same hills, on his own with a wounded shoulder.

Finally she returns to the ship, ducking into the shade of the cargo hold. There’s the smell of the soldering torch now. She follows it to where he’s deep in the bowels of the freighter, silver hair glinting in the opened hatch. And she waits until he deactivates the torch and straightens up, rubbing the back of his hand across his forehead.

“How does it look?”

He glances across at her, unsurprised. “Not good. I can maybe get one engine going but the other --” He shakes his head. “It needs parts we don’t have and I can’t put together.”

“Can I help?”

He’s as surprised as she is. His tone stiff, he holds the torch out to her. “If you want to take over this, I can focus on --”

“Yep. That I can do.”

They work together in tense silence for a few hours, the smell of melting copper in the hot enclosed air. He’s found a grey tanktop from somewhere and old battered shoes to replace the boots. She knows the wound must be hurting him. It shows in the paleness of his face and the lines of pain etching deep into his face, but he keeps on working, mouth tight with concentration. Together, they patch up circuitry and weld engine cylinders back into some semblance of mechanical health. Behind him, she strips off her longsleeved top and goes back to work in the thin singlet, focusing on the task at hand.

When he stops and hauls himself out of the engine recess, she looks at him sprawled exhausted on the steel grill floor. “We need to eat.”

“Yeah.”

His Imperial accent has slipped. In the crew lounge, she passes the packet of Tonitran jerky across to him, and he makes a face. 

“What? It’s either this or synthefood. Or would you like to find something?”

He shrugs. “Better than palp wafers, anyway.”

“Well, if you can fish,” she says unthinkingly and he grins at her.

“What,” Jyn breaks off. “You can?”

“No, but how hard can it be? I’ll have a go tomorrow,” he declares with complete masculine confidence.

“Oh my god.”

Before they resume the repairs, Jyn stops him. “That dressing needs to be changed.”

“I can do it,” he says automatically and she takes her hand off his arm.

“Oh, really? All this, and fish too? Please demonstrate.”

He gives her a look, cool blue and tiny freckles across high cheekbones. Jyn puts her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee, and watches him struggle with the patches and gauze for a good ten minutes. For a while there, she’s not even going to offer to help, merely enjoy this sight of masculine self-sufficiency. And he’s certainly not going to --

“Help me, please.” It’s not a request, it’s a command, delivered with pure annoyance. 

Jyn doesn’t bother to hide her smugness. He spreads his knees so she can stand between them and grin openly as she fastens the bacta patches in place and tapes up the wound. He has his face averted, his indignation a vibrating aura. And slowly Jyn becomes aware of the heat off his skin, the smell of engine oil and fresh male sweat, the scent of her own skin. The vine curls along his upper arm, delicate and perfect spring green. Against the thin material of her singlet, her nipples bead hard, heat gathering at her nape under her hair pulled back. 

“There,” she says breathlessly and turns away before he can see her face. It’s appalling and unnatural, it doesn’t even bear thinking about.

___________

 

They call it a day just before the sun goes down, emerging in the hot changing breeze. “Oh fuck,” she mutters, swabbing the sweat off the back of her neck with her wadded up top. He doesn’t notice or pretends not to notice, striding ahead to the tent as if he isn’t tired or wounded at all. It’s such a performance. 

Jyn glances off beyond the trees, remembering the pool. It’s near dark, it really isn’t smart at all to go bathing in strange waters when she doesn’t know about snakes or leeches or other sorts of nasty amphibious life.

“Fuck it.” She holsters the blaster, takes up the pipe in one hand and a change of clothes that aren’t hers under the other arm, and sets out into the darkening jungle. He doesn’t need to know. And she doesn’t trust him to come running if she’s in trouble, anyway.

Jyn strips off and washes her clothes, leaving them to dry on the bank when she wades in carefully, pipe held out in front of her, scanning the rippling surface by the reflected sunset light. The water’s so clear she can see right down to the pebbled bed. Nothing. She nearly loses her footing a few times, cursing her ankle, but catches herself in time. Soon she’s floating on her back, dreaming up at the unfamiliar stars, letting the water soothe her aches away.

The glimmering skies remind her of her father, of the first and last time she got to hold him. It seems like a lifetime ago. It wasn’t. Now, Jyn cries. For herself and everyone she’s lost, for the grief of surviving everything she shouldn’t have. Was it all a terrible nightmare, the last few decades of her life?

Or is this the unreality? This stolen paradise, this bizarre partnership with a man she should hate, still hates on a visceral level even though, even though … She lifts her left arm in the moonlight. Drops of water slide down her skin, across the glistening vine that trails almost halfway to the crook of her elbow. 

None of it can be real.

But her parents are dead. And her friends are dead. And the plans are winging across the galaxy, back to the woman with the serene face, and the dark serious man with grey at his temples. None of that can be denied, all too real like the red clouds of Jedha imploding and the sickly green ray shooting down from the monstrosity in the sky.

Thoughtful, Jyn wades out of the pool. The tropical night air has almost dried her clothes, but she changes into the ones she brought from the ship. Loose grey singlet and trousers she has to roll up above the boots she absolutely does not want to put back on. As she strolls back towards the campsite, idly drying her hair with her cowled top, Krennic appears between the trees, his hair catching moonlight.

“I thought you’d drowned by now,” he snipes.

“Bad luck.” She saunters past. Sure enough, he heads in the direction of the pool. 

“Watch out for the snakes!”

“There were no damned snakes,” he tells her when he returns a while later, looking as relaxed and human as she feels.

“No? What a shame. Maybe your evil scared them away.”

He makes a sound under his breath that very nearly seems like a laugh. In the distant cacophony of the jungle night, she turns up the lamp and waits for him to sit. They don’t talk as she changes the dressing on his wound even though her parents are so very present in her head, even though she sees the vine twist on in the shadows. He keeps his gaze averted, the line of his profile strangely elegant and perfect. His hair is slicked back dark silver from the bold contours of his face, the dancing lamplight catching patterns of freckles. She smells the coolness of water off his skin now and a warmth that is maybe just him.

“Thanks,” he mutters when she’s done.

Jyn says nothing, turning away to clear up the medical supplies. He passes her the jerky and they eat in silence under the stars, gazing out at the trees and the glimmer of beach and ocean.

“Do you want to,” he starts awkwardly, gesturing towards the tent. For one outraged moment, she glares. And then realises. 

“Oh. No, you go ahead. I’m fine out here. I prefer it out here.”

He doesn’t protest, crawling into the tent and letting the flap down. She sits for a while longer, her thoughts winding on through their lives and the galaxy.

“They knew.” Jyn keeps her voice level, looking up at the stars. “Whoever gave the order for the thing, the death ray. They knew you were down there. Didn’t they?”

He doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds. Then with an effort: “Yes.”

“Do you know who?”

“Yes.”

Now she half-turns her head. “What are you going to do about it?”

His voice is very cool. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“First you need to get off this planet,” she supplies with irony.

“Quite right.” He matches her tone, the Imperial accent slipping all over the place.

“My parents said you were the most dangerous man in the galaxy. That the most important thing for them to was to keep me safe from you, keep my father’s secrets safe from you.”

He is silent for a little while, and then laughs bitterly. “And look at me now.”

“Look at you now,” she agrees, smiling to herself.

Jyn makes up the thin bedroll for herself on the ground outside the tent, her thoughts reaching out to Cassian beyond the trees, beyond the hills. The crystal around her neck swings forward, reflecting starlight. 

“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

She pauses, her hands resting on the synthetic material. Listening to his voice in the dark.

“I never wanted that. For Lyra or for -- never for Galen. I thought -- more fool me, I thought that one day he’d come around, he’d understand why --”

“More fool you,” she murmurs, lying down. The stars stream across the dark skies above her.

“Yes,” he says heavily. 

____________

 

Reluctant as she is to admit it, they fall into a routine over the next few days. It doesn’t take very long at all. They take turns at the pool in the morning, breakfast together in silence, maybe talk on the way to the ship about what needs to be done, what progress has been made. Neither of them admit that the repairs are useless. That second engine will never be functional again. But they keep working, apart or side by side. In the evenings, they take turns to bathe, and eat together in front of the tent, gazing out toward the ocean through the foliage.

The fishing attempt is disastrous. He manages to keel over facefirst into the water, sending her into a fit of laughter so hard she thinks she may die. Until she realises that he’s gotten his wound full of saltwater, and that sends her charging into the surf after him, irate. He struggles upright, completely incensed, and orders her back to the shore. They yell at each other for about fifteen minutes, knee deep in water, before realising all the noise is probably scaring the fish away.

It takes a few days before they both work out exactly how to make it happen. To her great delight, Jyn masters it first. They’ve fashioned the rods, found the proper length of cord, experimented with bait. Now she gets the right flick of the wrist, hooks the fish and lands it. Perfectly gleeful because that only maddens him more.

He spends that whole day trying to reel a fish in, never mind engine repairs or anything. Chortling to herself, Jyn wades back to shore in her black singlet and rolled up trousers, holding her catch aloft. By the time he emerges triumphant, she’s elbow deep in entrails, completely repulsed by the whole experience.

“This is disgusting, I don’t think I can eat any of this!”

Krennic flops down beside her, rolling his eyes. “You say that now, just wait til we get them over the fire.”

He’s right, of course. The smell of roasted fish is divine and the taste even better after the last few days of jerky. The next day Krennic goes deeper into the jungle and comes out with a handful of small green fruit. 

“We’re going to die,” Jyn declares. “Are we going to die? You’re going to poison us with your stupid fancy marinade.”

“Shut up,” he says firmly, slicing one of the fruit open and squeezing it over the fish.

Jyn holds her face in her hands, moaning a little at the waste of a perfectly good catch. But he’s right again. It tastes wonderful, and of course he gets a bit cocky about that. She reckons it’s only a matter of time before his ego gets them into some serious digestive trouble so she refuses to try any more culinary innovations until he’s eaten and suffered and survived. 

His wound heals quicker the better they eat. His stamina improves, less pain on his face, less exhausted breaks. Her ankle is still sore. And the soulmarks grow faster, curlier along their arms. Hers reaches her shoulder. His reaches his wrist. Each a single twisting vine with tiny leaves and tinier fronds, delicate bright green against their tanning skin. He has to have seen hers by now but he never says anything. She doesn’t even catch him looking at it.

Four days later, they get the first engine working. Or at least they test it and the thing promptly blows a cylinder and starts belching forth a vicious green gas. “Fuck!” Krennic shoves her hard, choking. “Get out, get out!”

“No!” She reaches for the connector hose and they yank it out together as she covers her mouth and nose against the fumes. The engine dies, and they fumble out into the fresh air and sunlight, collapsing against the side of the wrecked freighter.

“Fuck,” Krennic says with feeling.

“Yeah.”

It’s going to take a day or so for the ship to air out. Until then, they can’t risk any more repairs. 

That night, the rains come. Not a gentle shower or a summer sprinkle. The skies gather black clouds over a full golden moon and unleash a downpour. Jyn yelps, bolting upright and then flailing out of her bedroll. When she pushes into the tent, half soaked and furious, Krennic is lying on his back, laughing like an idiot in the lamplight.

“Shut the hell up! Move over! My god, why are you so tall?”

He stops abruptly, clutching at the synth fabric. “Hold on, this is my sleeping bag.”

“Yes, I know.” Jyn knows she’s blushing but she’ll be damned if she’ll let her voice shake. “And you’re going to have to share. Now --” she waves a hand “-- spread it out so I can lie down.”

“You’re all wet,” he complains, sitting up to unzip the side. “At least bloody dry off before you get in.”

“Ha!” 

She grabs up his discarded cape and rubs it hard across her hair and body. But he, weirdly enough, looks away, keeping his eyes on the sleeping bag he unfolds across the tent floor. Jyn feels herself blush all over again, her mouth dry as she lies down on the smooth material. 

The rain hammers on the taut orange fabric above their heads. 

“Ground’s going to be all muck tomorrow.”

Krennic agrees, his bare shoulder several distinct inches away from hers. “Might not be able to do much work tomorrow.”

“No.”

They lie there in the horrific awkward silence, and eventually Krennic reaches to douse the lamp. But the moon shines so strong through the driving rain that the tent glows with cool light. Jyn sighs and turns onto her side, resigning herself to a sleepless night.

It feels like forever, lying there, so aware of him, of his breathing and his warmth. She can’t get the memory of his freckled shoulders out of her head, how smooth his skin felt under her fingertips. Those stupid pink nipples. She curls up tighter on her side, around the hot yearning below her navel. It’s insane, she shouldn’t be thinking anything like this. Her parents would be horrified, Cassian would --

Then she’s dreaming of vines, long and green and tangling around her nakedness, sliding over her bare skin like so many illicit caresses. Her body arches in its confines, moans spilling from her throat, and she wakes to the sudden shooting pain from her ankle. She wakes and realises in an instant that she’s draped over Krennic, her leg angled across his, her aching wet sex against the warmth of his hardness like their clothes are too thin. Her breasts are squashed soft against his chest, and her mouth is warm and wet against his throat. 

Jyn shudders, so angry and terrified of herself, and looks up into clear curious blue eyes. The rainlight glimmers their skin, the roar of water like white noise secluding them from everything else in the galaxy. Her lust sears through her as she looks into his eyes, so much raw fierce lust and so much violent hatred. Her heart pounds with it.

Krennic lets his gaze move below her face. And his fingertips come to her shoulder, to bare skin, tracing a thin delicate shape that seems to warm and grow under his touch.

“Do you know what this is,” he asks her, quiet and careful. 

“Nothing. It means nothing. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”

“No?” He’s looking at her mouth, his lashes so pale and pretty over the soft blue of his eyes. “What do you believe in?”

“Justice.”

His brows go up, a silent derisive challenge.

“Vengeance,” she admits. And the truth of it burns in her, like flame all the way under her skin. Cassian would loathe her for this. Cassian isn’t here. Instead she’s stuck with this nightmare of a man, a man she should loathe with uncomplicated righteousness. And instead she wants to hurt him and fuck him and hurt herself on him. “Revenge.”

She breathes with some pain, her heart pounding so hard he must feel it. He watches her with that deep curiosity, his breathing unsteady like this insane physical longing streams through him too. His mouth is crooked and damp, weirdly alluring.

“I loathe you,” she whispers.

“Do you? Am I --”

She never finds out what he tries to say. Because she kisses him with such violence, her spine arching like a snake striking, open mouth and teeth. He gets his hand into her hair, kisses her back, unleashed, pushing her onto her back, all hardness and heat. In the orange tent, they tear at each other’s clothes, tear into each other with mouth and breath and nails. His fingers are too thick inside her, opening her up for his cock. But she takes hold of it at the base, thick and red, and splits herself open on him. He lets out a ragged shocked sound at the heat and tightness of her, and surges to grasp the smoothness of her back, fucking up into her engulfing cunt. Every thrust, every movement jolts her unhealed ankle, the pain a sharp edge to the pleasure rolling through her. It’s fast and desperate, hateful so hateful and exhilarating. 

When in the middle of it he puts his mouth at her shoulder, she glances down to see the vine is changing on her. So she rips the bandage away from his wound, delighting in his pained cry, and watches the vine sprout from his shoulder. One becomes many, they fuck on, faster and sweating in the humid closeness of the tent, and the vines snake around the old wound, around the new jagged wound breaking its seal and bleeding a little. He rolls her onto her back, fierce blue eyes and red sharp mouth that she pulls to hers, kissing him hard as he fucks her deeper and harder, fucks her faster til she’s coming and coming, feeling like her whole body tangles in vines, like they’re both caught up and fastened to each other, skin to skin, breath to breath, lost in each other.

___________

 

The rain continues for the next day. They barely notice, filling the tent with moans and the reek of sex and skin. She dozes and wakes more than once draped over him, her snarled hair across the smooth skin of his chest, his absurd pretty nipples within reach of her mouth. They sleep and eat and fuck, like this hunger once acknowledged can’t be sated now. And when they venture out into the downpour, seeking separate privacy in the trees, Jyn aches every moment they’re apart. The skies roil with masses of dark cloud, the air crackling with energy. It’s like nature has rioted along with them.

They fuck outside in the monsoon, filthy with mud and sand, water needling into their feverish skin. The rain soaks his hair, turning it dark as she locks her legs around his waist and he drives into her, wet mouth and muddied face. He’s a kind of insane beautiful. She puts her fingers into his mouth, wanting to invade him, choke him with all of her. Hot breath in humid air, she kisses him as he comes into her, shuddering and violent. 

The rains stop but they don’t. The routine gets interrupted, the repairwork all but ignored. Against the side of the wrecked freighter under sunshine and clear blue skies, their moans are loud and shameless, clothes shoved aside just enough to have his cock up inside her, to have his hand on her bare left breast half covered with vines, his teeth on the underside of her jaw. 

There’s almost no tenderness and somehow the sex is all the more satisfying for it. She feels completely bare, stripped of all pleasantries, of any noble ideals. He knows her for what she is, and she knows him. Here isolated from the rest of the galaxy, trapped in this fury of incomprehensible undeniable desire. They don’t talk about it, merely fuck and watch the vines grow thicker and greener around their hearts. In the tent, in the ship, once out on the open beach, on all fours in the white sand as the vast pitiless ocean rushes in at them. He holds her fast, his hands on her breasts, thumbs rubbing across her sensitive nipples. The sand keeps slipping from under her hands, it feels like a terrible sign but she doesn’t allow herself to think about it. Reaches back to grab his hair and fuck him back, breathless and crying out and sweating under the vast perfect sky. Daring the galaxy to witness this.

One morning when they’re sitting outside the tent, finishing breakfast, Jyn rummages through the medkit and finds the strip of pills. About to crack the bubble on one when he says, “You don’t need to worry about that.”

She glances across at him sitting there, chewing on a protein bar. Waits for a few moments, then raises her brows. Some more information would be helpful.

“I had a procedure.” His mouth twists. “Those are not the sort of consequences I care for. Not with the career --”

His face changes and Jyn looks down to the medkit as she puts the pills back, uneasy at the weird sympathy she feels for him. 

It doesn’t occur to her til much later that he could have lied.

Then there’s the time she fastens a single binder around his wrist, magnetises it to the wall of the cargo hold. One arm curved above his head, he’s beautiful and insolent, all hot blue eyes and his free hand pulling his trousers open. She kisses him, open-mouthed, as she takes hold of his cock, hot hard and familiar now, like it’s hers to claim. He reaches down and cups her cunt in his big hand, kisses her back with so much hunger like they haven’t done this a few hours ago, like they’re not going to do it again in another few. 

He unsnaps her trousers and rubs her cunt, watching her moan and bite her lip, watching her peel down the black singlet, her nipples out and tightening in the weird metallic air of the ship. She tugs at his cock, the skin of her palm just rough enough to make him gasp. And then she turns, bends forward, thighs apart, and impales herself on his cock. “Oh fuck,” he exclaims but is already gripping her with that one hand, his hips snapping forward, hard and fast. Jyn uses him like he’s some sex droid attached to the wall, vicious pleasure curling her mouth, making her that much wetter and excited. 

He always fucks her like it’s the last time. 

Sometimes she watches him as he bathes by the trickling waterfall. In the cool morning before the heat of the day turns the air sticky, she sits on the bank and watches him in the water. He’ll swim a few circles of the pool, long lazy strokes of taut arms and strong calves, and then in the centre of the pool, he washes himself, aware of her but never saying anything. His skin gleams a complex perfection, mostly tanned now but there are still these mouthable patches of pale skin, the freckles like changing complex starbursts across all of him. Water laps dark and clear against the sleek contour of his hipbones, around the curve of his arse. And when he moves toward her, intent eyes and damp mouth, she leaves her clothes on the bank and swims to him.

Maybe there it’s not quite so violent. Maybe there he kisses her with a deep stillness that almost feels like tenderness. They float together, touching in the numbing water, licking nipples and tracing vines. Her legs tangle around him as his cock slips into her, as her hair streams on the rippling surface of the pool. And when he carries her out and lays her down on the bank, every sensation heightens out of the water, too beautiful too painful a pleasure to have his skin rub hot against hers, to fist her hands in his hair and kiss him deep, have him groan as her cunt pulls him in deeper. He covers her with his body, curving his arm around her head as they kiss, his thumb smoothing along her brow. Then the pleasure is slow and rich, pushing thought away to focus only on instinct, on taste and caress and this bliss.

Two weeks and she still expects Cassian to walk out of the trees, her heart corroded with half hope half dread. Maybe he’ll find them like this, locked together in naked gasping wrongness.

____________

 

When Cassian does return, they’re both sitting outside the tent, eating in silence. Jyn’s heart lurches sickeningly at the sight of him. 

Then everything moves very fast, in a gabble of talk and activity. He had found a Rodian refugee settlement several days journey away but his wound had gotten infected and he had lain in a fever for nearly a week, tended to by the clan.

A Rodian pilot takes them to Yavin 4 where the former Director of the Imperial Army is immediately taken as a prisoner of war and whisked out of sight. Jyn doesn’t get to talk to him, nor does she try. As the working chaos of the Rebel Alliance closes around her, she retreats into her own thoughts, and watches.

Her ankle heals. The medics find her fit if slightly undernourished, and make no mention of the soulmark that covers her entire left breast, curling around the deep pink of her nipple.

Maybe Cassian senses something has changed. He doesn’t spend too much time with her, already absorbed back into the ceaseless operations of the Rebellion. When they do talk, their conversations remain in the here and now. He never mentions Krennic to her, she gains that information from the talk around her at the meals and the training exercises, at the simulations.

Jyn Erso is now training to be a Rebel pilot, headed for the orange jumpsuit and helmet and U-Wing fighter. Her defiance is still in evidence. Mothma still thinks she’s reckless, that she needs to be supervised, leashed in. So even though she can fly, she stays put and works the ground crews. Every time she picks up a soldering torch, for a moment she’s back in the bowels of the stricken freighter, watching the light delineate all the creases and freckles of his face.

She thinks the vines may brown and shrivel up, die off. They don’t. They stay as they were the last time she saw him. And sometimes, just sometimes they tingle, like the moments when they were together and he touched his fingertips or his mouth there. She thinks of him now in his cell, lying on the narrow cot and looking up at the blank ceiling, his fingers tracing their shape around his heart. She thinks of him and sometimes, just sometimes she touches them too.

The battle station is destroyed -- by the flaw her father built in and died to protect, by the squadron named for the dead. When the news comes, the Rebel base erupts in cheers, people hugging each other, hugging her whether they know or not. Jyn Erso smiles and disentangles herself, walks slowly back to the room she shares with a young female pilot, a girl who wears her idealism closer to the surface than her trauma. Everyone in the Rebel Alliance comes from trauma but that girl makes Jyn feel very old and very jaded.

She sits on her bed for a little while and then gets up, walks down the long corridors out of base accommodations, out towards where the cells are located. While the people and allied species celebrate with fireworks and music and so much relief, she gives the guard her name. It might make no difference at all, maybe --

The guard unlocks the door and steps aside. Startled, she takes a breath in before she pushes it open.

Orson Krennic turns from the small barred window. The light from the fireworks outside catches the silver curves of his hair around his lean face. He’s uncannily beautiful, she sees that now and hates herself for it. Beautiful things are not necessarily good. She knows that, reminds herself but it’s little comfort.

“Have you been told,” she asks, her tone neutral.

And there’s the rage. Like a tidal wave of blue grey, like storms and hurricanes. All his fury blasts off him, the years of preparation, of manipulation and hard work, of all his ambition. The deaths, she remembers. All the people he sacrificed for this thing blown out of the dark skies.

“Have you come to gloat?”

“No.” She closes the door despite the guard’s little step forward. And she comes to sit on his bed, narrow and made up. 

“What’s going to happen now?” She doesn’t look at him, her gaze focused on the grey duracrete floor. He stays where he is, watching her as his rage contains itself.

“A trial, I imagine. Assuming the war is over.”

Which it may not be. The Empire can’t be defeated in one hit, surely. The war may drag on for years more. And later when there’s time to look at reparations and justice, then the long months of a court trial, cataloguing of war crimes. And the verdict.

“Is that the only option?” Now she raises her eyes to him, quietly shocked all over again by the reality of him standing right there. Alive. Not blasted to smithereens on the tower, not incinerated on the battle station. But here, so vibrant and weirdly elegant in the dark grey loose trousers and short sleeved top. Watching her with that devious brain working fast behind his eyes.

“What else would you suggest,” he says with some irony. As she shrugs, he comes to sit beside her, a careful few inches between them. “Any attempt to escape will probably not succeed. And even if it does, even if --” he laughs softly “-- it’s not likely that I’ll be allowed to stay out there in the galaxy, free from pursuit.”

“The Alliance will hunt you forever.”

“And there will always be a bounty.”

He’s right, of course he is. “Then cooperation,” she begins. “Defecting, telling everything you know. Helping --”

He gives her a slow sad smile. “Nothing will ever be enough. You know this. You,” he says quietly, “of all people.”

“Yes.” She folds her hands together on her knees, feeling very small and adrift in a galaxy that no longer has a place or a path for her, if it ever did.

He isn’t the only one who should have died on Scarif.

“Anyway,” he adds, a curious lightness to his tone, “what does it matter to you what happens to me?”

Jyn isn’t going to dignify that with an answer. She gets up and leaves, shutting the door firm behind her. 

Later in bed in the dark, she realises she had no answer anyway.

___________

 

The disturbance happens about two weeks later. Jyn is in the pilot hatch of a U-Wing, focused on the maddening intricacy of a malfunctioning navigation system, when a siren starts to blare. It’s not the heartstopping terror of the one that sent her and Cassian on the mission, this one is more sedate. But around her, people still scramble to alertness, calling questions and speculation as they stream towards the hangars. Jyn peers out to see an armed squadron run in the direction of the cells, Mothma and a few generals hurrying behind.

She knows without being told. For a moment, she’s tempted to keep her head down and keep working. There’s a sense that everything could shift now. Like the moment on the tower when Cassian held her back. Everything changed because she broke his hold, because she didn’t listen to him.

And now everything will change again.

She blends into the crowd around the entrance to the cell complex. But there are too many people and the voices are too far down so she works her way through, quietly apologising as she goes. She gets close enough to the front of the crowd to see that Krennic has a blaster to some hapless guard’s head, his back against the corridor wall.

“You overestimate your importance,” Mothma is saying, her beautiful face very tense.

Krennic laughs, unhinged. “Not for the first time.”

“You realise whatever it is you want, you’ve just destroyed all your chances for any kind of leniency from the Alliance.”

“Oh, I’m ever hopeful.” The electric energy vibrates off him, from the darting attention he divides between Mothma and the audience and the guards with their weapons trained on him.

“What is it you do want?”

“Safe passage out of here. Not in six months time, not in a year. I don’t care to languish in a cell while the Alliance tries to restore the galaxy to their idea of order. I want out now. In return for -- uh uh uh --” he swings the blaster towards the soldier trying to creep up on him, arm tightening around his captive’s throat until the man gasps and struggles “-- stay the fuck there, mate. Any of you come one fucken step further and I will kill this little twerp. You know I’m capable of it. And you know --” his eyes flash at Mothma “-- you know I have nothing left to lose now.”

Jyn sees the discreet gesture the Chancellor makes that has all the soldiers retreating. “You were saying,” Mothma asks. “In return for this, what do you offer us?”

He returns the blaster muzzle to his captive’s temple. “Any and all information about the Empire you require. I will make myself available to the Alliance at all times, not in person, only via communication channels. All times. But you give me a pilot and you give me a ship out of here. Right fucken now.”

As the crowd murmurs around her, Jyn looks to Mothma.

“You’ll hardly be safe out there in the galaxy once word spreads you’re alive.” 

“I’ll take my chances.” His eyes are glittering, he’s thoroughly enjoying this.

Mothma sighs. “Justice has to be seen to be done. You can’t simply evade the law because you feel like it.”

She gets a grin that’s wide with defiance like acid. “Can’t I? Justice was done. To my life’s work,” he says with savage emphasis. “Or was that not enough for you people?”

“I’ll go.”

Jyn says it quietly but somehow everyone hears and turns to look. Mothma lifts her chin, steeling herself. And Jyn is very aware that Cassian makes no move, says nothing at all.

“I’ll go,” she repeats, walking forward out of the crowd. Krennic watches her come, the blue eyes hooded, his mouth thin and unreadable.

No one stops her. Maybe that says something about her status as tragic heroine, maybe something about how meaningless she personally is to them. She doesn’t care. Krennic lets go of the frightened soldier and pulls her to him, blaster at her throat, his body hard and familiar against her.

It works. Maybe that says something about her value to the Rebellion after all. Or maybe it’s just him and his terms. Whatever it is, the crowds mutter amongst themselves as Jyn and Krennic make their way out, and he steers them towards a very new very shiny shuttle. 

“Typical,” Jyn mutters so only he can hear.

It’s a two person craft which suits her fine. And neither of them relax until the ship clears the atmosphere. She takes a breath in, not looking at him in the engineer’s seat as she readies for the jump. “So where to?”

He sighs, the blaster on his thigh now. “I have no fucken idea. I hadn’t thought this far ahead.”

“Oh my god,” she exclaims, aghast.

“What,” he yells back. “I didn’t think it was going to work, did I?”

“Well, think of some place! We can’t idle here forever, they’re going to come to their senses and --”

“I know!”

They’re yelling at each other again, it’s like they’re right back on that tropical secret world. Her heart warm with an absurd relief, Jyn tries to focus on the instruments. “Lexrul?”

“Too obvious.”

“Maybe it’s so obvious it’s actually genius.”

He’s giving her a very sceptical look. Then his face changes. “What do you know about Wild Space?”

Jyn blinks and doesn't say the obvious. “Seems reasonable. But we need coordinates.”

Krennic grins.

__________

 

It’s a planetoid of forests and a small ocean, relatively unspoiled to Jyn’s eyes but there’s a haphazard sort of spaceport and shipyard complete with droids and open air cantina when they land. A short grumbly creature with red skin demands credits for docking permission. 

“Don’t look at me,” Jyn says. “You’re the one who decided to --”

“I need a job,” Krennic says to the creature. “I’m good with ships --”

“He’s an engineer,” Jyn pipes up. 

As the creature frowns at her, Krennic talks on. “-- I can help with repairwork, whatever you need.”

“He’s an architect, too,” Jyn murmurs, wandering towards the cantina. She’s hungry now, and there’s a curious mix of humans, droids and more of the short red creatures talking and moving across the shipyard. Beyond the ragged metal fencing are tall trees, clear skies above. She’s remembering the white beach and that stupid orange tent. They can’t go back, of course they can’t.

Krennic catches up to her as she enters the cantina enclosure of wooden beams and tables. “How do you know this place,” she asks, taking a seat. There are such lovely smells of food in the air, the conversations of Basic and other languages a comforting burble around them.

“My father.”

Astonished, Jyn turns her attention to him. He pushes his hair off his forehead, automatically smiling at the little red waitperson who gives him a menu and tells them in Basic what the specials are. The green vine curls all the way from his wrist up his arm to disappear under the short sleeve of the prisoner top.

“We have no credits,” Jyn reminds him after they’ve ordered.

Krennic smirks. “You might not. I do.” He puts a small heap of credits on the table between them. “And a job.”

“Seriously?” She doesn’t know whether to be outraged or impressed. “Have you fleeced someone out of a palace as well?”

He grins, wide and boyish, his tongue flicking out to his upper lip. His charm is such a lethal irresistible thing, it makes her breath catch in her chest, indignant and mesmerised at the same time.

“Not yet but give me some time.” His eyes sparkle. She thinks she may hate him even more now, because she’s realising that maybe she doesn’t hate him at all anymore.

Somewhat sternly, Jyn says, “What do you mean, your father?”

The planet is called Syterria, he tells her. The little red creatures are the indigenous population, although there have been human colonies and other immigrated species here for a while. “My father was born here,” he says, smiling thanks at the Syterrian who has brought them their food and drink. This one seems already a little too fascinated with him.

By the time Jyn’s finished her meal, Krennic’s gotten information of lodgings from the infatuated waitperson, and directions to local transport. About two hours and a rather rattly tram journey later, she’s watching him hand over credits to a satisfied Bivall landlord in the doorway of a small cottage with a blue roof and a blue door. It’s a little surreal, she knows that she should be unnerved.

But there’s a hot breeze off the ocean she can see. A short walk away, across the path and down the sloping scrub to the white sand and perfect blue waves coming in on delicate foam. She takes off her boots and walks, watching the lace of froth curl around her bare toes.

Her friends are dead, her parents are dead. The galaxy is spiralling on around her, away from her. And the pain somehow seems easier, all those years of trauma and loss, even the rawness of recent grief. Somehow she feels easier with the world now, accepting the way her life has shaped her and knowing now the way she’s shaped it.

Jyn walks for a while, alone with her thoughts. Eventually she raises her head to see a man sitting on the sand up ahead, watching the ocean. Dark grey clothes, silver tousled hair glinting in the sunshine. As she approaches him, he turns his face to look at her, his hands hanging loose between his knees. Without a word, she sits beside him, dropping her boots into the sand. She knows she looks the same as she ever did -- dark longsleeved top, dark trousers with strapped weapons, dark hair messily pulled back. The same girl, soulmarked and healing now.

They sit in silence, watching the blue sky over the ceaseless blue ocean. And then he says with perfect Imperial accent, “You can take the shuttle back.”

She says nothing.

“I won’t need it. Paru’s got enough work for me for several -- I can’t see myself going anywhere in the near future. And even if I had to, for whatever reason, it’s no problem to find something.”

Jyn gets to her feet, picking up her boots. As he glances at her, she turns and makes her way back up the slope. Back across the path and to the row of cottages, to the one with the pale blue door open. 

It’s cool and white inside, a little sandy but clean enough. She puts her boots by the door, undoes her belt and leaves her weapons and holster on the white wooden table. In the little generator refrigerator is meat and fish and fruits she recognises. Little blue flowers propped in little glass jars on the window sill.

When Krennic ducks his head under the lintel to enter, she is sitting on the bed, reaching up to undo her hair. There’s a very careful tension around him that fills the small cottage when he closes the blue door. Her hair falling in coils around her shoulders, Jyn takes hold of the bottom hem of her top and pulls it up over her torso and over her head. She knows he moves toward her, watchful as she lets her top fall to the scarred wooden floorboards.

“You heard what I said.”

Jyn pulls her singlet off and tosses that down too. Flicks a glance up at Krennic who swallows, irritation spasming around his expressive mouth and eyes.

“The soulmark doesn’t mean anything. You know that as well as I do. I’m not -- I refuse to be held to some stupid archaic romantic belief.”

She tilts her head, mischief waking in her. He was the one who brought up the soulmark thing, not her. And now it gives her the idea to touch herself, just the fingertips of her left hand trailing from bare shoulder along the profusion of dark green vines twisting and curling across the curve of her breast, around the dark pink point of her nipple. He draws in a sharp breath through his nose -- stupid perfect elegant nose -- but he stays where he is, a few feet from her, eyes hot angry blue.

“You can go back to your precious Rebels, back to your good life. You certainly don’t owe me anything, you never have. Whatever --” he falters, painful “-- the damage I’ve done to your life, I know you’ve -- whatever you need to do to make peace with it, to wreak whatever revenge you want on me -- that’s fine, I understand. If you feel you have to stay here to keep watch on me, that’s fine. If you want to exile yourself because I’m too fucken dangerous to be let loose on the galaxy, appoint yourself my captor, my warden, I understand.”

Krennic glares at her, breathing a little too fast. “But you don’t have to stay.”

Jyn reclines back on the bed with its pretty white and blue coverlet, grins at him with perfect insolence. And says: “I know.”

He stares at her for a few wild seconds, and then he’s on her, a fury of mouth and hands and desire. She pulls the grey prison clothes away, reveals his body with its faded tan and the absurd pink nipples she bites hard on, pushing him flat on the bed to cover his body with hers. Skin to skin, his hands are in her unbound hair, his thumbs on the underside of her jaw. He kisses her like he’s been tried and found guilty of all the war crimes in the galaxy, like the verdict of death’s been handed down. All that blasts through her mind, the life they dodged, so many moments of death.

The white and blue coverlet skews off the bed, smells of sun and salt breeze as she buries her moans in it, as he sinks his cock into her and presses his chest to her back. He holds her so close, one hand clasped over her left breast that tingles with sensation, and he moves hard and fast in her, faster and faster because it’s been too long without this, too long apart. She comes in bright blinding light, and comes again, crying with rightness, shuddering as he shudders with her, comes with her.

___________

 

The life they build is small and very near perfect. While Krennic takes a speeder to the shipyard, Jyn works in a beach bar, happy to be so close to the water always. She gradually casts aside the dark warrior clothes, wears instead light trousers and long tunics in pale blue and white. These days she goes mostly barefoot unless they have to go into town. Her hair grows long and shaggy, thin little braids in its darkness. They’re both tanned now, Krennic in blue denim and loose white tops, his hair a sort of silver mane tufting out around his lean face. They work, bicker a lot, and make a few casual friends to fish with, but mostly they keep to themselves.

The Rebellion makes contact almost every week. Sometimes they keep Krennic on the holonet channel for hours. He hardly ever complains. And Jyn knows that’s because she’s always a few feet away, lying on their bed reading as he tells the Empire’s secrets. Because when the transmitter clicks off, he gets up, stretches his aching back, and climbs into bed to kiss her and take her softly down against the pillows. 

When they’re alone in the cottage, she wears short floaty printed dresses that she knows drive him a little crazy. He kisses her with a mouth that’s delicious and filthy, running his hand up her bare thigh under the flimsy material. Pulls the dress to her waist and undoes his trousers so his cock finds the wet willing heat of her cunt. And she laughs into his mouth, her fingers tangled in the curls of his silver hair as she takes him in and takes him deep.

A year to the day they landed on Syterria, she lies in bed with him, their skin damp with sex sweat. The hot ocean breeze is coming through the open window, fluttering the sheer white curtains in the afternoon sun, the sound of the waves a distant comforting murmur. And as he traces the lush intricacy of her soulmark, kissing her every now and then, Jyn lays her left hand flat against his heart. Feels the warmth and tingle of the vines moving along her arm, under her palm, moving on her breast. 

Krennic blinks down at her touch. She’s never done this before. And when he gives her a quizzical look, his eyes so clear, she tells him what she’s realised over the past year. “Soulmark or not, we’re bound to each other. And I love you.”

He smiles at her, a glowing beautiful gentleness that only she sees, that she never knew he was capable of until this life they’ve made together. That she never knew she was capable of until now.

He kisses her and tells her with a soft seriousness that he loves her too. And the vines put forth tiny white flowers, tangling them ever on.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I combined the soulmark trope with prompt 23 -- _Jyn finds bleeding, half dead Krennic after battle of Jedha. Plans are gone in hands of Rebels and he expects that she’ll finish him. She doesn’t, instead she helps him heal_ \-- and prompt 98 (mine) -- _So there’s some terrible battle and an explosion, and things go totally balls up, and somehow Krennic and Jyn have to take shelter together despite the fact that they’re epic archenemies. Lots of bickering and grudging working together, and eventual sharing of a sleeping bag. Extra hot chocolate if they end up doing the do in said sleeping bag_ \-- from the [Jynnic Fandom Challenge](http://jynnicchallenge.tumblr.com/theprompts). 
> 
> Only obviously we came up with those prompts before the movie was out so I got to use the actual ending of the movie and twist it.
> 
> The single binder sex in the cargo hold was totally inspired by a section in onstraysod's brilliant [_Bite Off More Than You Can Chew_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7514422) cos I couldn't get that out of my mind.


End file.
